A common Western monotheistic theological
A common Western monotheistic theological perspective regarding the nature of justice and righteousness is that there is no perfect justice to be found in this world, and that perfect righteousness belongs to God alone.
From one perspective, this is an unabashed declaration of the reality of both God and the next world. From another, it is a pragmatic recognition of a geopolitical truth: no nation has ever achieved perfect justice in its political dealings or been able to act with perfect righteousness.
Unfortunately, there are people—not pundits or politicians, but ordinary folks—who seem to believe that perfect justice and perfect righteousness are not only possible on this earth, but are to be expected. Folks like Thomas Ng, of Menlo Park, California, who writes in to the Wall Street Journal, and is approvingly quoted over at the aptly named 68.81.138.3:
“In his Oct. 2 editorial-page article, "It's All About Vietnam," Robert L. Bartley dismissed the anti-Iraq war stance of Al Gore and Ted Kennedy as being all about a Vietnam albatross hanging around the Democratic Party's neck. He went to great length to describe how the war in Indochina started and ended. However, he did not do the same for Iraq or Afghanistan. He did not mention how Washington propped up Muslim-extremist "freedom fighters" when the enemy was Russia, or built up Iraq's army and supported a dictator like Saddam Hussein when the other side was archenemy Iran.
How many more dictators and human-rights violators are we willing to support to further American short-term interests? Now that these U.S.-built forces have turned against America, it's too simple to use a lurking Vietnam syndrome to account for all anti-war sentiment. It's natural to be patriotic after losing at least 3,000 innocent lives. But amid an emotional situation, it takes courage for American lawmakers such as Sen. Kennedy to challenge the American attitude that the U.S. is the only rightful leader for the whole world.”
The best that can be said of Mr. Ng’s perspective is that it is naïve, perhaps irredeemably so. America’s “short-term interests” in both cases cannot be extricated from the 50-year context of the cold war with the former Soviet Union. It would indeed be nice, warm and fuzzy if the United States could manage what no nation in the history of the world has ever managed: namely, the perfect execution of its ideals, expressed by perfectly righteous behavior, resulting in perfect justice for all other nations with which it had contact.
That being said, there is not now, nor has there ever been, a nation that has come so close to that impossible goal as America. If Mr. Ng can present another method that could have been used to resist the expansionist totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, he should do so. We were right to resist that ideology, and we were right to use the means that we did, simply because those were, by and large, the only means available to us. Mr. Ng’s belief in the possibility of perfect righteousness and justice in American foreign policy is coupled with a belief that we should also have at our disposal a team of prognosticators and oracles who can foresee the ultimate end of every action that we take.
With missteps of varying moral consequence along the way, we buried the Soviet Union and dispelled the totalitarian oppression that it leveled against its citizenry. Not being godlike, we now have to deal with the consequences of the actions we took to achieve that goal. What Mr. Ng and others who think like him fail to comprehend is that leadership is different from governance. America did not want to dismantle the Soviet Union so that we could take it over; we wanted to dismantle it so that it would cease to be a threat to us and so that its people could govern themselves. Similarly, we have no interest in ruling Afghanistan or Iraq. We will lead the fight, and then leave the people to their own devices. It’s what we did in Germany. It’s what we did in Japan.
Once again, under the guise of “dispassionate” consideration of the events of 11 September, an ordinary American opines that all America truly seeks is hegemony and empire. Nothing could be further from the truth: in fact, we were so unwilling to govern Afghanistan that we—mistakenly, it now turns out—withdrew entirely from the region once we had bled the Soviets enough.
America is the undisputed leader of the free world. Citizens of every country on the globe vote with their feet, coming here to enjoy what we have to offer. Perhaps, in some Star Trek future where replicators supply the material needs of all mankind, we can maintain our freedoms and way of life while acting with perfect righteousness and achieving perfect justice among the nations.
Perhaps the utopian Mr. Ng thinks that we should cede that mantle of leadership to people like Sadaam Hussein. Perhaps he can achieve heaven on earth, where we have failed.
Somehow, I doubt that. I suspect that 20,000 nerve-gassed and genetically damaged Iraqi Kurds would probably agree with me.
